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MIT Media Lab research: less media, more healthcare

The new director of the MIT media Lab wants his researchers to design fewer …

The new director of the MIT Media Lab hopes to shift the lab's research to better help the "disadvantaged, disabled, and disenfranchised." Frank Moss wants to focus less on the projects that defined the Lab in the last century—multimedia innovations, wearable computers—and more on the kind of research that will have wide-ranging and more direct impact on society, like healthcare.

The 28 faculty who work at the Media Lab are currently pursuing a wide range of projects that include the "society of mind," "smart cities," and "context-aware computing." Moss hopes to guide the researchers toward more projects like the $100 laptop championed by Media Lab cofounder Nicholas Negroponte.

The Boston Globe quotes critics who wonder if the new changes are simply a way to raise more sponsorship dollars from industry and if they will result in more "commercial" research at the expense of "blue-sky" projects that have no apparent practical purpose. But the Media Lab has always been more commercially oriented than the big labs specializing in basic science. MIT's focus on engineering has meant that even the least practical projects at the Media Lab look like iPods when compared to the basic scientific research that takes place elsewhere.

Corporations don't necessarily invest in institutions like the Media Lab because they want short-term R&D, though; that's what they pay their own engineers for. Corporations don't want research to be so esoteric that it can never be commercialized, but they do want academic labs to do the kind of research not often found in industry. Tom O'Donnell of Cisco says, "The reason we're there is to get connected to the longer-term thinking. It's the stuff they're doing that we don't know about, that's what we want to get tied into."

The new emphasis comes after several years of turbulence in which MIT attempted to expand the reach of the Media Lab into Europe and Asia. Both ventures proved to be ill-fated. The Dublin facility closed in 2005 and MIT pulled out of the Indian lab in 2003. With new leadership in place and Negroponte spending most of his time on the OLPC project, the time is right for some change at the Media Lab.